Menu

Antidote to Trump

Americans have spent much time over the past 1 ½ years trying to diagnose and understand Donald Trump. Is he neurotic, psychotic, a sociopath, a narcissist, a psychopath or all of the above?

Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV).

He wrote in a letter to the editor of the NY Times:

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

The political leadership needed to stop Trump will come from fierce resistance from citizens, investigative truth-telling from the media and moral courage from politicians in both parties.

I strongly disagree with Professor Allen Frances’ take on the DSM-5. Yes, I do know that he is an expert and I am not. I still disagree with him. Who Trump is, whether he is mentally ill or not, we know that he is not fit to hold the office of President of the United States. He is corrupt and has most likely committed acts of treason. At the very least, he is aware that the people in his cabinet have committed treason. Thanks to you, Tom, I have stopped caring so much about his emotional or mental status. We need to see Trump investigated and impeached. We are all fools if we think that can wait any longer. Then we will see what we can find out about Pence’s activities and whether or not he has also committed treason.